Saturday, October 18, 2014

Now the Republican governor, a likely presidential contender, is back in Austin and scrambling to avoid a damaging perception problem like the "oops" moment that doomed his first shot at the White House.

At first, Perry seemed to have everything under control. When a man in Dallas was diagnosed with the deadly virus, Perry held an Oct. 1 news conference, assuring the public that "there are few places in the world better equipped to meet the challenges posed by this case." When more people were quarantined, he launched a task force and told Texans to "rest assured our system is working as it should."

But then he left Sunday for a long-planned 7-day trip designed to burnish his foreign policy credentials. During his absence, two more cases of Ebola were confirmed, both of them involving Texas nurses who had dealt with the first patient.

The governor cut his trip short and rushed home on Thursday, only to encounter criticism for leaving in the first place....

As long as we have a Democratic president, no Republican officeholder is going to be held accountable by Republican primary voters for failing to do the right thing on Ebola, no matter what he or she may have done or failed to do. Republicans running in 2016 who've had to deal with Ebola are going to be judged on one criterion: How much did you distance yourself from the president? It doesn't matter whether Obama and his administration handle Ebola flawlessly from here on in -- the test will be whether you denounced Obama at every possible opportunity and said that everything he was doing was wrong.

On that test, it's not clear that Perry gets a passing grade:

Unlike other possible Republican presidential contenders, he has laid off the hot rhetoric blaming the Obama administration, instead calling for calm. He told reporters about a phone call he had with Obama, signaling his new, harder-line stance on handling Ebola -- by calling for a travel ban on visitors from countries most deeply affected — without focusing on the differences he has with the White House.

It may be silly to take Rick Perry's presidential ambitions seriously at all, but even if you do, he's not going to be judged on "crisis management" in this situation, as the article suggests -- he's going to be judged on how much he hates Obama. That's how every Republican presidential aspirant is judged on pretty much everything.